I didn’t really have a choice when asked if I would review Abdul Salam Zaeef’s My Life With the Taliban. Despite nearly a decade of US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) military involvement in Afghanistan, and a seemingly endless stream of writings and opinions on the Taliban — the religio-political movement that

was in control of most of Afghanistan by the time the US overthrew it (dispersing it into a number of guerilla insurgencies in the process) in the post-9/11 Afghan war — there are hardly any first-hand accounts of this most ideological of Afghan movements since Communism. Indeed, Zaeef’s autobiography is the only such account that I am aware of in a Western language. That in itself would be enough to commend it, but Zaeef’s life — he was born and raised in the poverty of rural southern Afghanistan, and has been, successively, a refugee in Pakistan, veteran of the anti-Soviet jihad, lifelong Talib (“student”; “Taliban” is the plural form), onetime ambassador of the Taliban government in Pakistan, and Guantanamo detainee — has certainly not been short of incident. By virtue of Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn’s translation, and apparently supplemented by multiple interviews with Zaeef, this life is recounted in an engaging and at times affecting book, one which offers a glimpse into a country few of us know much about, despite — or perhaps because — of years of media coverage. 
The book is at its strongest when Zaeef writes about his early years, coping with the loss of his parents, and forced to flee to Pakistan in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, to contend with the squalor of refugee camps. At such points, the book’s plain style generally serves it well, enabling the reader to get a clear sense of the human suffering underlying Afghanistan’s conflicts.
One cannot, of course, fall into the condescending trap of ascribing greater artlessness to the narrative of a Talib than of authors more “like us” in some way. In the grand tradition of autobiographies, Zaeef’s has its share of cynical lacunae. For instance, likely well aware of the fact that most of his readers are unlikely to be sympathetic to the Taliban’s policy of preventing access to even middle- and high-school education for girls, Zaeef has little to say about it, simply referencing the issue to take digs at foreign diplomats. “The ambassadors of Germany and Belgium were impolite, ruthless and arrogant. Both were... full of prejudice; they always wanted to discuss the position of women”. Elsewhere Zaeef expresses disapproval for “efforts to give men and women equal rights in everything... and allowing women to take off their scarves…”. Of especial interest to Indian readers would be his references to India and to terror groups like the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT). But one would search in vain for any such discussion: neither the LeT nor any other group, nor the Kandahar hijacking, nor even India’s role in post-2001 Afghanistan, are ever mentioned in the book; indeed “India” itself is mentioned only once.
Likewise, Zaeef does not have much to say on the relationship between the Taliban and Al Qaeda, or even on whether or not he believes Osama bin Laden was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, simply “fear(ing) that he (would) claim responsibility... whether he was involved or not”. On the 9/11 attacks themselves, Zaeef records his reaction, that he “knew Afghanistan and its poverty-stricken people would ultimately suffer for what had... taken place in America”, but does not say much more. He is no less coy on the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, a spectacular act of cultural vandalism that is hard to ascribe to any political purpose beyond sheer fanaticism: Zaeef suggests that he wasn’t in favour of the destruction at that point in time — “the destruction was unnecessary and a case of bad timing” — but doesn’t say much more, leavening his account with scorn for the Japanese delegation that urged the Taliban to spare the statues, and even offered to remove them from Afghanistan.
Zaeef’s attempts to breeze past this atrocity cannot disguise his utter lack of empathy for the Japanese, or indeed everyone else’s, position — although he doesn’t seem to have any rejoinder to the Japanese rebuttal of his dismissal of “statues... made out of stone by the hands of men” that “the Kaaba in Mecca was also made by stone and by the hands of men”. Zaeef’s lack of empathy is even more apparent in his repeated references to Muslim lives and deaths — it isn’t even that no others matter to him, so much as that they don’t seem to register. Indeed, his loathing for the Pakistani state/Inter-Services Intelligence seems to proceed almost entirely from his sense that, under Pervez Musharraf, it betrayed the cause of Muslims, including by handing him over to the Americans — much of the book is an account of Zaeef’s ill-treatment at the hands of American soldiers in various prisons, including Guantanamo. The blindness is more than a little disturbing, and ostensibly underscores the challenges of compromising or negotiating with a mindset that doesn’t appear to recognise that any other approach might, at least with respect to Afghanistan, have any validity. According to Zaeef, “(t)he only way to find a solution for the problems is to respect Islamic values” — as defined by the Taliban.
However, to the extent Zaeef’s blindness reminds the reader that the author remains a partisan in an ongoing struggle, one should be cautious of falling into the trap of taking this book’s implicit absolutism at face value. That is, precisely because My Life with the Taliban is calculated to sway (global?) public opinion, it might not always be a good indicator of the Taliban’s red lines as far as any Afghan peace process is concerned. The point isn’t that we not take seriously, for example, the Taliban’s stated refusal to negotiate until their conditions are met, but that this book places us in a zone of ambiguity if we read it to figure out What The Taliban Want To Do Next. More broadly, the paucity of such first-hand accounts risks exaggerating the importance of the ones that do make their way to us — such as Zaeef’s.
Ultimately, however, no book — and certainly not My Life With The Taliban — can bear the weight of the rest of the world’s policy failures, or of our collective desire that the foreign lands we wage war in should be quickly explained to us. The book should be read because of the story it contains: the testimonial from a land ravaged by decades of war, that “we” — in the United States and other Nato countries, and even in India and Pakistan — have embroiled ourselves in but have never really bothered to understand except as a stereotype. A glimmer of understanding, of empathy for the world Zaeef comes from — that is to say, our world and
none other — is its own justification. 

Umair A. Muhajir is a lawyer based in New York.
He blogs at http://qalandari.blogspot.com about films and politics.